3.0 artwork

As I’ve now been involved with GRAMPS development for a while, it is time to take up the burden of doing some writing on this blog. Let me write about one of my achievements for 3.0, the artwork. I’m really pleased with it, and hope you are too. You’ll have to be looking at it for an awful long time if you use GRAMPS regularly.

The call to rework the icons came from Don perhaps two years ago. He wanted to shift from the semi realistic look of 2.0.x to the new freedesktop/GNOME Tango style, and partially started that for 2.2.x in 2006. He is no graphical artist though, so this was only partially done. Now, it must be known that I cannot draw, nor paint, well, actually, I barely can hold a pen straight. However, I don’t mind to try, and try again, and again. The beauty with PC is you can mess up as much you want, you have UNDO, and ZOOM and whatnot to help along while you stumble. So that is how most of the new icons came about. In all fairness, most are shameless ripoffs of other Tango Icons, others are based on Gnome icons and for 2 or 3 some people send in improvements (eg the family view icon). You can see the changes here and a somewhat outdated page with the new icons here.

The consequence of all this work is that only the most generic icons are dependant of the base system, things like edit, add, list, … . All the rest will look the same whether you are on Windows or GNOME, … . This should help users as it means the screenshots on the manual will actually look mostly as they see them before them. The system is furthermore set up in such a way that one can override the base GRAMPS icons with icons from an icon set, provided they add icons for gramps. Well, that probably needs some testing, although 2007-04-01 did see it in action (see attachment there).

Is this it? Probably not. Some icons are still missing, eg the import and export. And styles keep changing. So if you are itching, tune in, and send in some suggestions, especially if you are a better artist than I am!